"Everything absolute belongs to pathology. Joyous distrust is a sign of health." So proclaimed Friedrich Nietzsche. Note well that he used the adjective "joyous" to describe distrust, not "cynical" or "grumbling" or "sour." The key to remaining vital and strong while questioning every so-called absolute is to cultivate a cheerful, buoyant mood as you do it. That's one of your top assignments in the coming weeks, Aries: Practice joyous distrust.

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"I admire your boldness in naming the currents flowing beneath the surface," I replied, "but I’m curious as to why you imply they’re all negative. To practice radical authenticity, shouldn’t you also express the raw truth about what’s right, good, and beautiful? Shouldn’t you unleash the praise and gratitude that normally go unspoken?"

Brandon sneered. He thought my version of radical authenticity was wimpy. I hope you don’t. As a budding lover of life, you have a mandate to be honest in both ways.
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Powells.

Here are the best and most enjoyable ways to capitalize on your current astrological omens: (1) Transform one of your so-called liabilities into at least a temporary asset; (2) lose any attachment you have to pleasures and rewards that won't mean much to you a year from now; (3) allow and even invite people to show you how you can get smarter; (4) compassionately identify the limits of the people you care about; (5) squeeze every last lesson out of what you're leaving behind.

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Write the following on a piece of red paper and keep it under your pillow. "I, [put your name here], do solemnly swear on this day [put date here] that I will devote myself for a period of seven days to learning my most important desire. No other thought will be more uppermost in my mind. No other concern will divert me from tracking down every clue that might assist me in my drive to ascertain the one experience in this world that deserves my brilliant passion above all others."
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Powells.

In Big Russ and Me, a memoir about growing up, journalist Tim Russert writes a lot about what he learned from his father. Here's one story: Whenever a family member accidentally broke some glass, his dad took extraordinary precautions wrapping up the shards in a sealed box before depositing them in the trash can. Why? Because he wanted to be sure the garbagemen wouldn't cut their hands. I urge you to be that conscientious in the coming week, Gemini. Imagine in detail the impact your actions might have on all the people, both known and unknown, whose lives you touch. The gods will reward you for doing so.

How much do you want to know about your destiny in the coming week? How far do you dare to go? For more insight into your intriguing fate, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES

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In some spiritual traditions, devotees attempt an arduous process of self-transformation as they retrain themselves to perceive the world from God's point of view. If they succeed, they're honored with an initiation ritual and given a new sacred name to consecrate their altered state.

In my opinion, you've done work equivalent to the rigorous labor of those devotees. You may not have sequestered yourself for years in a mountaintop monastery, and you may not have risen every morning at 5 a.m. to say prayers for hours. Instead, your spiritual transformation has unfolded as you've dealt with the challenges of daily life during our epic moment in history, when unprecedented levels of destruction and creation are the norm.

You have earned the right, therefore, to enjoy an initiation that will welcome you into the pantheon of bodhisattvas, saints, wizards, and avatars. It doesn't have to be long and complicated, and you can create it yourself. As an example of what you might do, here's a ritual that some Beauty and Truth Laboratory's initiates have performed: 1. Eat a pinch of dirt to declare your solidarity with Mother Earth. 2. Burn a five-dollar bill to purify your relationship with symbols of wealth. 3. Kick yourself in the ass to affirm your ongoing intention to discipline your shadow.

As one of your initiatory rewards, you can adopt a fresh spiritual tag. There's no need to abandon your existing name; just add your new alias to the mix.

Are your cohorts looking at you quizzically, wondering why you seem so energized from exploring the shadowy, off-limits places? I'll offer some suggestions about what you could say to them. First, try to make them see that until you've risked going too far, you may not know when to stop. Second, tell them that you suspect there are healthy desires buried at the roots of your dark feelings, and you're hoping to free them. Third, explain to them that you're not picking at your scabs in order to prolong your hurt, but rather to better understand the hurt. If those rationales are too subtle for your companions to understand, cackle softly and say that you just need to be a little bad in order to give your goodness more soul.

Want more help in exploring the Great Mystery that is your life? I discuss your coming week in greater depth in your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES

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Like all of us, you have desires for things that you don’t really need and aren’t good for you. But you shouldn’t disparage yourself for having them, nor should you conclude that every desire is tainted. Rather, think of your misguided longings as the bumbling, amateur expressions of a faculty that will one day be far more expert. They’re how you practice as you work toward the goal of becoming a master of desire. It may take a while, but eventually you will get the hang of wanting things that are really good for you, and good for everyone else, too.
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Powells.

A lightning bolt is hot, fast, and potent. It can travel at 100,000 mph, reach temperature of 60,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and generate enough energy to illuminate a light bulb for two months. And yet it's usually no more than an inch in diameter. This is an apt metaphor for the kind of highly concentrated power you will have available in the coming days, Leo: deceptively petite in proportion to its enormous wallop. Please use it wisely.

Want more clues? Need further insight? For more evocative questions and pithy suggestions about your destiny in the coming week, check out your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES

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Plant orchids on a strip-mined hill.
Imagine you have a guardian angel who looks like Malcolm X.
Teach an animal to dance.
Hire a puppet troupe to reenact your life story using marionettes in Renaissance costumes.
Make believe you are the ocean king or thunder queen.
Improvise a fresh bedtime story for someone you love.
Put on an inflatable sumo wrestler costume and play a bagpipe as badly as possible.
Watch TV with your third eye.
Sip holy water blessed by a smart teenage girl.
Bear in mind that you are the Chosen One, and so is everyone else.
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Powells.

At Free Will Astrology, we love to turn things upside-down and inside-out every now and then. It keeps our mental hygiene sparkling clean, and yours, too. This week, in order to incite a purifying ruckus, we're offering you a challenge from psychologist James Hillman. Please suck the following thoughts into the deepest recesses of your understanding, and enjoy the brainstorms they detonate: "By accepting the idea that you are the effect of a subtle buffeting between hereditary and societal forces, you reduce yourself to a result. The more your life is accounted for by what already occurred in your chromosomes, by what your parents did or didn't do, and by your early years now long past, the more your biography is the story of a victim." What I'm trying to tell you, Virgo, is that it's a fine time to rebel against your genetic heritage, your upbringing, and your conditioning. Imagine a life for yourself in which you don't believe that those factors control what you're capable of.

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Philosopher William James proposed that if our culture ever hoped to shed the deeply ingrained habit of going to war, we'd have to create a moral equivalent. It's not enough to preach the value of peace, he said. We have to find other ways to channel our aggressive instincts in order to accomplish what war does, like stimulate political unity and build civic virtue.

Astrology provides a complementary perspective. Each of us has the warrior energy of the planet Mars in our psychological make-up. We can't simply repress it, but must find a positive way to express it. How you might go about this project?
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Powells.

It's the Season of Returns and Recoveries, Libra. You will generate good fortune if you look for what you lost. Here are some suggestions on how to proceed: Recall important memories you've almost forgotten, retrieve any valuable things you rashly threw away, and bushwhack your way back to a promising path you strayed from. For best results, you should forgive yourself of any mistakes you think you made that led to the loss.

What blessings will life bring you in the coming week? What challenges will you be invited to dive into? To explore the ripening trends further, tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES

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If I ever produce a self-help manual called The Reverse Psychology of Getting Everything You Want, it will discuss the following paradoxes:
a. People are more willing to accommodate your longings if you’re not greedy or grasping.
b. A good way to achieve your desires is to cultivate the feeling that you’ve already achieved them.
c. Whatever you’re longing for has been changed by your pursuit of it. It’s not the same as it was when you felt the first pangs of desire. In order to make it yours, then, you will have to modify your ideas about it.
d. Be careful what you wish for because if your wish does materialize it will require you to change in ways you didn’t foresee.
Review your own life and identify experiences that exemplify these four principles.
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Powells.

For reasons too silly to go into here (involving romance, of course), I once spent six months making thrice-weekly three-and-a-half-hour roundtrips from Chapel Hill, NC to Columbia, SC. The back roads I drove on were sparsely traveled and my ancient pick-up truck didn't have a radio, so I passed the time by reading. I became quite skilled at continually darting my eyes back and forth between the road and the open book resting on my steering wheel. In this way I got through James Joyce's Ulysses, Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. I don't advise you to try something so dangerous, Scorpio, but I do believe it's a perfect astrological moment for you to master the art of slipping back and forth between two starkly different realities.

Need a few more whacks applied to your mental blocks in the coming week? A few more caresses administered to your growing edge? Cruise on over to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES

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A thousand years from today, everyone you know will be long dead and forgotten. There’ll be nothing left of the life you love, no evidence that you ever walked this planet. That, at least, is what the fundamentalist materialists would have you believe. But suppose the truth is very different? What if in fact every little thing you do subtly alters the course of world history? What if your day-to-day decisions will actually help determine how the human species navigates its way through the epic turning point we’re living through? And finally, what if you will be alive in a thousand years, reincarnated into a fresh body and in possession of the memories of the person you were back in this era? These are my hypotheses. These are my prophecies. Which is why I say: Live as if your soul is eternal.
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Powells.

A group of us decided to throw a party. The Sagittarian among us, Rosa, insisted on being in charge of supplying the desserts. She feared that if anyone else handled this task, there wouldn't be enough, and they wouldn't be sweet enough or rich enough or decadent enough. To make sure the delectable treats were available in rapturous abundance, she felt she could only trust herself. In this spirit, I appoint you to be the sweet, rich, decadent dessert-provider for the entire world in the coming weeks. I'm using "desserts" in both the literal and metaphorical senses.

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In The Book of Embraces, Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano writes, "The fishermen of the Colombian coast must be learned doctors of ethics and morality, for they invented the word sentipensante, or 'feeling-thinking,' to define language that speaks the truth." Describe a time when you pulled off the feat of thinking with your heart and feeling with your head.
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Powells.

Among modern Baghdad's most prominent architectural features are its blast walls. These omnipresent concrete barriers shield buildings from truck bombs and random gunfire. They were nothing but oppressive eyesores up until a few months ago, when a team of 40 artists began covering them with brightly colored murals that depict idyllic landscapes and glorious scenes from Iraqi history. Your next assignment, Capricorn, is to try an equivalent conversion. Add beauty to something ugly; bring a light touch and a creative spirit to a troublesome situation; dress up your defense mechanisms in silk and gold.

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When you're an aspiring master of pronoia, you see the cracks in the facades as opportunities; inspiration erupts as you careen over bumps in the road; you love the enticing magic that flows from situations that other people regard as rough or crooked. "That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal," wrote poet Charles Baudelaire, "from which it follows that irregularity--that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment--is an essential part and characteristic of beauty."
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Powells.

Let's meditate on events that have an impact at a great distance from their origins. For instance, African dust reaches Florida, raising pollution levels, just as particulate matter from China floats over to sully California's skies. Here's another example: The CIA played a major role in overthrowing the democratically elected prime minister of Iran in 1953, and this is still wreaking chaos on the current relationship between the U.S. and Iran. In the coming week, Aquarius, I predict your life will provide another example of this theme, although in your case the long-range influence is likely to be far more benign than the other cases I cited -- possibly even downright benevolent.

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Similarly, chanteuse Billie Holiday believed a good singer should never sing a song the same way twice. If you use all the same phrasing and melody, she said, you’re failing your art.

The only Zen master we know--whose name we can’t tell you because she changes it every week, and we haven’t heard the latest one--likes to quote the ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus: "You cannot step into the same river twice, for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you."

Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has the last word: "Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Powells.

"Open your minds, sweethearts," begins the soothing rant of enlightenment advisor Dvorah Adler. "Take a deep breath in and a deep breath out. It's time for you to hear the big secret of the ages, the radical truth of truths that only the wisest gurus and avatars and grandmothers are brave enough to reveal. Are you ready? Here it is: 'SHUT UP AND BE HAPPY!'" I'm pleased to convey Dvorah's ancient truth to you, Pisces, because it's what you need to hear right now. So please, darlings: Shout, whisper, or sing "SHUT UP!" to all the voices in your head that are so addicted to saying "What am I doing wrong?", "When will I finally be happy?", and "Why can't everything be perfect forever?" The fact is, you are exactly where you need to be, and everything is proceeding with mysterious grace.

No one knows you better than you do. But maybe you'll be inspired to dig up even more self-knowledge in the coming week if you tune in to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES

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A common obstruction to a vital intimate relationship with another human being is what I call the assumption of clairvoyance. You imagine, perhaps unconsciously, that your partner or friend is somehow magically psychic when it comes to you—so much so that he or she should unfailingly intuit exactly what you need, even if you don’t ask for it. This fantasy may seem romantic, but it can single-handedly sink the most promising alliances. To counteract any tendencies you might have to indulge in the assumption of clairvoyance, practice stating your desires aloud.
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The preceding oracle comes from my book, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It's available at Amazon or Powells.